There are various disorders, diseases and types of injury, which the spinal column may experience in a lifetime. One of the more common solutions to treating these conditions involves a surgical procedure utilizing mechanical hardware. The mechanical hardware used to immobilize the spinal column typically involves a series of bone screws and spinal rods or plates. When the spine surgery is performed, it is common practice to place bone screws into the vertebral bodies and then connect a spinal rod between adjacent vertebral bodies.
The process of properly inserting the spinal rod into the receiving slot of a bone screw and then securing that connecting spinal rod in place often can require that the surgeon use a number of instruments and expend a great deal of time and effort to accomplish the task. When bone screws in several adjacent vertebrae are to be securely connected by a spinal rod, the repeated process of inserting the spinal rod into the heads of the bone screws and then securing the spinal rod in place for each respective bone screw can be difficult, tiresome and time consuming. Further, the alignment of the spinal rod as it connects to each of the sequential bone screws may require adjustment during the procedure and, therefore it is beneficial that a device and method be provided by which the spinal rod can be reduced into the head of each of the sequentially aligned bone screws and, as desired, easily adjusted so as to facilitate the process for the surgeon with minimal effort and loss of time.
For these reasons there remains a need for a device that is capable of securely grasping the head of a bone screw in a controlled, measured manner and reducing a spinal rod into the head of that bone screw in such a way as to permit easy position adjustment as other portions of the spinal rod are reduced into other bone screws.